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Pickens writes "Live Science reports that 1,000 people from 61 countries have signed up with the Quake-Catcher Network to take advantage of built-in accelerometers in newer laptops that transmit data about earthquakes to researchers at UC Irvine and Stanford University. 'It's providing additional data that can be fed into the seismic networks,' says Elizabeth Cochran, a UC Irvine geoscientist. 'It also allows us to record earthquakes at a scale that we haven't been able to before because of the cost.' Cochran came up with the idea for the Quake-Catcher Network when she learned that most new laptops come equipped with accelerometers designed to switch off the hard drive if the laptop is dropped. 'I figured that we could easily tap into this data and use it to record earthquakes.' While traditional seismic monitors can detect earthquakes of magnitude 1.0 or less, the lowest magnitude the Quake-Catcher Network can detect is about 4.0, a moderate quake much like the one that hit LA on March 16. But what the network lacks in sensitivity, it makes up for in price as traditional seismic sensors cost $5,000 to $10,000 apiece. 'Ideally we would have seismometers in every building, or at least on every block. And in tall buildings, we'd have multiple sensors [on different floors],' says Cochran. 'That way, we would be able to actually get much higher detail images of how the ground shakes during an earthquake.'"

IBM/Lenovo ran an ad a long time ago talking about his new Thinkpad stopping the drive when the laptop was falling. The other guy grabs the laptop drops it on the ground and says so the hard drive is fine.

The other guy says that's not my Thinkpad, hilarity ensues.

But if all you need is an accelerometer, somebody needs to tell this guy to write an app for the iPhone, iPod Touch, my Droid, and probably a lot of other phones.

So we're looking at at least $4000 for a typical MacBook that isn't complete shit.

You said entry-level, not 'cheapest decent'. An entry-level MacBook is $1k, end of story. Similarly, a new entry-level video card costs about $100. It's not determined by whether it runs Crysis or is suitable for a power-user, entry-level is meant to be lowest cost that meets some minimum requirement to be a part of the group (ie, it's a laptop and not a netbook).

In all seriousness, they use the laptops to provide supplementary data to model the shaking of the ground and the buildings, not as primary earthquake detectors. People deliberately shaking their laptops are their least concerns. (Normal shaking, like from typing, is more important.)

I would think that there would be enough of a variation between models that any software attempting to obtain such information would have to be tailored for specific models. The surface that the laptop is rested on may also come into play.

Just wait until someone releases a paper on how to detect exactly what someone is typing by examining the accelerometer. That would be a very interesting research project and have possible consequences for anyone just randomly giving out data like this (not that I have anything against this project, I would use it on my play laptops but not my work laptops).

Is not the accelerometer a component of the laptop? In that case, if an adversary can obtain the readings from the accelerometer, they should have enough access to the machine to just install a keylogger. Therefore this technique, while technically interesting, seems rather pointless as a realistic attack vector.

I suspect, though, that substantially fewer mobile phones are well coupled to the earth at any given time.

Laptops aren't fantastic in that regard; but they are substantially better. Most of a laptop's "on time" is spent sitting on some more or less solid piece of furniture. There are the "user wandering around holding the thing" and "sitting in user's amply padded lap" and "on top of cushion on top of pile of blankets on top of bed, overheating" data points that you have to be able to filter out; but tho

Oh, I totally agree that for "purchasing off-the-shelf-tech as a cheaper substitute for purpose-built seismometers" cases, mobile phones are the way to go. Cheaper, lower power, smaller, solid state, even the ghastliest of them can do SMS to report back to HQ. Buy 'em in bulk, glue them to stuff, get bulk rate on SMS from whatever local telcomm is hungriest. Game over. Laptops don't even compare.br>
However, my impression was that this project was looking to piggyback on equipment that is already in the

The trouble isn't noise per se(cellphones would definitely be noisy; but laptops have things like typing to consider, so they are both noisy); but lost signal.

If a laptop is sitting on the table, on, it is fairly well coupled to the ground(not as well as a pro seismometer, where phrases like "located on concrete piers attached to bedrock" tend to crop up); but reasonably well. The actual accelerometer chip is soldered onto the board, which is bolted into a rigid frame, which has a few thin, non-skid rub

There's an actual tricorder app for the Android (don't know about the iPhone). Best app ever - comes complete with acoustic, accelerometric, magnetic and solar data, and the all important sound effects. Now if I could just flip it and talk into it like in Star Trek.... geek bliss.

The balance board uses strain guages, which can't detect earthquakes to my knowledge. Similarly, motionplus is gyroscopes, which in this case are not accurate enough to determine the very small displacements from an earthquake.

However, I'm very surprised they're not just going for a bulk purchase of unlocked smartphones, it must be cheaper and just as accurate as laptop accelerometers. Laptops seem very roundabout...

Ah, I fail at reading comprehension. It's a distributed computing measure, meaning that yes, the laptops are already in the field doing someone else's work, they just happen to be earthquake sensors as well.

[phone rings, Quake-Catcher volunteer answers]Volunteer: "Hello?"Quake-Catcher Scientist: "Hi, Mr. Jones. We'd like to ask you some questions about a highly-localized event last night."V: "What?"S: "We clearly read a 8.8 Richter reading in your apartment last night around 10PM, but we can't confirm this with any other data."V: [puts hand over handset] "HONEY?! DID YOU LEAVE THE LAPTOP IN THE BED LAST NIGHT?!"

Not to mention that you'd have to do it at exactly the same time as an actual earthquake, since afaict they plan to use the laptop data only as supplemental data to get more detail about events that they detect with the traditional seismometer network.

This specific implementation (the quake-catcher network) has been around for several years already, so this is already old news - and I believe there was indeed an article on slashdot about a similar idea for smartphones. I think I posted information about this in that article's comments, actually.

Well, it is actually quite easy... there is a lot of software available that will capture the data from accelerometers and display it to you. The hardware is pretty simple and I guess the APIs are easy to use (I'm not a programmer I'm just assuming based on the software I've seen). When I first got a computer with an accelerometer (a Thinkpad from a couple years ago) I was even able to set it up to use the accelerometer input as a joystick in linux. Not practical, but kind of amusing to try to play a flying game by moving the whole computer around:) There are also several programs for iphones and Android devices that will output all of the accelerometer data to you (on android I recommend the free "Tricorder" program, it shows you data from all the sensors and more than you probably thought possible).

Therefore it should be - and apparently was - fairly trivial to set up a program to run in the background logging and monitoring the data

The neat thing is that the accelerometers really are quite high-resolution, and there is one measuring each direction (x, y, and z) which real seismometers also do.

I hope you like replacing small proprietary fans. And reseating mini-PCIe cards buried deep within the guts of the system. And generally getting to know all the horrid little connectors that infest the modern laptop.

The first link in TFS has a Google map. The google map shows a single laptop for Africa, located in Cairo. Zoom out and you can see it's not a fluke, because the other continents have plenty of entries of either laptops or USB sensors (compare to Puerto Rico or US presence)

It's not for primary detection of earthquakes, so they know exactly when to look for interesting data from the laptops, and they can look at the motion of the laptop before and after the earthquake and throw out any results from laptops that were moving about at the time.

That's just a new part of Superfetch. Windows 7 knows you're about to move the mouse, so it warms it up.

Seriously though, how flexible is your floor, could easily be shifting the floorboards. Dunno about its usability for quakes though, you're missing at least one axis of movement and probably magnitude in the remaining ones.

So how do I determine if my laptop has one? And if it does, how can I get access to it by software? Even if the is one or more accelerometers in there for protection of the hard drive, it will require a presence in the I/O address space, I assume, for it to be used by this or any other software. Apparently this exists, or the software would be as useful as Duke Nuken Forever, but I have not found any insight in the articles on how accelerometers can be accessed. Can anyone provide some technical details? I would like to use this for other applications, but would gladly share any earthquake data that the system captured while it was idle if I had the hardware.

This could also provide interesting data in the case of a large office building, allowing better analysis of how the structure reacted to the motion. Hundreds of points of measurement, in a real-world structure, during and even, could lead to even better understanding of failure modes for structures.